From Open Access to Guarded Trust

In the golden age of software engineering, data was an open book. Engineers had almost unlimited access to the information, enabling them to glean insights, refine products, and optimize system performance with relative ease. Consider the rise of platforms such as Facebook and Google, which in their early stages benefited significantly from vast datasets and harnessing user information to improve experiences, refine algorithms, and even predict user behaviors. For companies such as Amazon, customer data was not just for user experience; it was central to building recommendation systems that, to this day, account for a significant percentage of its sales. This access, however, was a double-edged sword. While data-driven insights propelled tech giants to unprecedented heights, they also led to privacy debacles.